Joe Biden makes it official: he's in the race

The senior senator from Delaware, Joseph Biden, has officially announced that he is running for president in 2008.

Joseph Biden born 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvaniagrew up in Delaware

Delaware's longest-serving Senator (six terms, 34 years)

currently Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

has served as Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary

son Beau is Attorney General of Delaware

was a presidential candidate in 1987, but had to withdraw when it was revealed he had copied way too much from a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock

“Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines in northeast Pennsylvania and who would come up after twelve hours and play football for four hours? It's not because they weren't as smart. It's not because they didn’t work as hard. It was because there was no platform on which they could stand.”

It seems Joe Biden didn't have ancestors who worked in coal mines.

(In a perfect world, I'd consider plagiarism unforgivable. But wouldn't you prefer someone who's even read Neil Kinnock to a functionally illiterate leader whose use of English pales in comparison with that of the Pakistani president or the Jordanian king?)

And Joseph Biden...

voted in 2002 to authorize military intervention in Iraq- now a vocal critic of the war

JoeBiden.com (certainly a much more professional website than Bill Richardson's; that's one clue as to who's running for president and who for vice president)